PHJF wrote on Sep 12, 2011, 17:21:Hey I've got this brilliant idea for a user-friendly UI. Let's have a bunch of single-line scrollable text and then a giant fucking image of the item on half the screen.

I dunno that his description of their bug-killing strategy really meshes with the reality of it. Maybe it's just the GameBryo engine, but there are just so many things in Oblivion/FO3/NV that can cause the engine or game to just crash to desktop without any hint at what the error was. I'm hoping that the Creation Engine they built, if it's going to crash about as much (especially when you start piling on mods), at least helps modmakers and troubleshooters figure out the issue. Be even better if they just caught errors better and didn't immediately dump out to desktop...

Creston wrote on Aug 22, 2011, 22:13:I agree, but nowadays you can apparently be a "gaming journalist" if your entire gaming experience was "TEH HALOZ! LOLZZZOR!11!1!!"

Silly elitism. I could easily make the argument that even having played Deus Ex is not enough, and you have to have played a Pong console or grew up with the Atari 2600 to be a true game journalist. But I wouldn't make that argument, because it's ridiculous.

Believe it or not, there are 25-year-old critics out there who actually understand the history of gaming pretty well and do a fantastic job of writing about games.

Diablo 3 is, in my mind, one of the better candidates on the upcoming crop of exclusive PC games to work on consoles. Think about it. Control scheme is nearly perfect for this with the exception of say, like D2's Sorceress teleport, but you could buffer up a longer teleport with a longer press on the cast button. You've got enough triggers and buttons to map a full eight commands directly to buttons (or that right analog stick) without any bullshit. The system requirements aren't incredibly high, the player limit won't likely be an issue, and mods aren't really intended to be a part of the game. The only challenge I'd see would be in screwing around in the inventory.

I think it'd work fine on consoles... as long as 1) the PC version goes unchanged, and 2) console players get their own version of B.net to play on.

Verno wrote on Aug 16, 2011, 14:54:Yeah I wasn't really feeling that at all either. One new move and some better weaponry was all that seemed interesting there. I hope the two years went to story and stuff instead because the combat was already decently refined in the second game barring some interface stuff.

Agreed. The E3 demo was promising on this front, and it did have story content.

Gameplay trailers are always going to be action-heavy, and ME1 and 2 both had similar trailers without much story in them. I'd really like for ME3 to have at least one good few-minute-long trailer with some important story elements, though. I know that EA wants BioWare to pull in new gamers and not just the current fanbase, but give us loyal fans a bone here.

Weapon skills in action-RPGs are generally a bad idea for the same reason that they were removed going from ME1 to ME2: because there's just no good way (yet) to explain why the same gun, that fires the same-powered bullet, to the same spot on the target should somehow do any different amount of damage by characters with two different "skill" levels in that gun. (It's also why using level disparity to reduce weapon power in games like Borderlands became really annoying when the disparity was any more than tiny. How many 50cal-sized bullets, regardless of my level, do I really need to dump into this asshole's head to penetrate through his skull?)

The only gameplay-related way to balance it, then, is to make the gun's sights shake and wave all around if you don't have enough skill. Go and play Mass Effect 1 and use a sniper rifle early game to find out how successful that idea turned out (hint: it was infuriating to try and play, and completely silly to see some lauded Commander in the Alliance Navy that couldn't hold a rifle inside of a 15-meter spread on a downrange target). To balance it, they had to sway the sights so much as to make you feel like you were falling-over drunk just to stop people from still getting headshot after headshot. It was annoying and ineffective. ME2 tried to deal with this by allowing only some classes to use some gun types, and then in higher difficulty levels and by adding kinetic barriers and armor to nearly every enemy - but it still wasn't really perfect.

Now, if you had a game with a lot of diving, jumping, and running, then maybe you could get away with huge accuracy adjustments with skill by saying that the character's skill is in aiming the weapon with precision while doing acrobatic moves, but that's generally not how most action-RPGs play out.

Jerykk wrote on Aug 14, 2011, 21:56:FO3 definitely has better dungeons. They were bigger, more interesting and most of them had some sort of backstory, whereas most of the dungeons in FNV were small, bland and typically had no backstory (which is weird given the game's much better writing).

If Obsidian makes another Fallout game and improves their dungeon design, they may just have the best RPG evar.

I think Obsidian has already improved on this quite a bit in the DLCs. The story of the Survivalist in Honest Hearts as well as quite a few running stories in Old World Blues' random spots really put in that flavor that I missed from FO3.

Verno wrote on Aug 15, 2011, 08:40:I'm not sure what you're looking for here, sympathy or consideration? Most people here aren't going to care about what features console gamers get because the games are usually made for them anyway. If you want FoV adjustments and etc then you need to let the developers know but be prepared to be a minority who is ignored (and there is some irony here somewhere).

I think I've got what I'm looking for. And the result is this: PC gamers still have a fucking looooong way to go.

saluk wrote on Aug 15, 2011, 07:28:PC gamers don't really need fov controls. The fov has more to do with how close your eyes are to the screen than they do with the width of the screen. Also, since you are further away,

And again, people are presuming to know for sure how console players actually play. This only holds true in a house with a sizable living room. Millions of console gamers are playing differently than that.

Regarding your thoughts on the game, I don't think this is well-suited for you. Go back to the ones where every button press gives you an instant, shiny explosion and you can interrupt those annoying cutscenes and conversations with a murderous rampage. Deus Ex is not for you.

So again, why is it that PC gamers deserve these settings but console gamers don't?

Because the vast majority of console gamers don't care about these things and thus, don't demand them. If they did, these features would start showing up in console games.

They didn't think they needed two sticks to control first person shooters, either. Then Halo put that control scheme in by default, and now every console action game's like that. Progress happens one developer at a time, one game at a time, same on PC as on consoles.

Developers themselves are the catalysts behind most features in big video games. (Including FOV.)